On Collaborative Model-driven Development of Microservices

TL;DR

This paper explores how collaborative model-driven development can be adapted for microservice architectures, addressing challenges of distributed team collaboration and aiming to reduce complexity in microservice implementation.

Contribution

It surveys characteristics of collaborative model-driven software engineering and identifies key challenges for applying it to distributed microservice development.

Findings

Identified challenges in applying CMDSE to MSA

Proposed a framework for collaborative MDD in MSA

First step towards holistic MDD for microservices

Abstract

Microservice Architecture (MSA) denotes an emerging architectural style for distributed and service-based systems whereby each microservice is highly cohesive and implements a single business capability. A microservice system consists of multiple, loosely coupled microservices. It provides complex capabilities through services interacting in choreographies. A single dedicated team, typically practicing DevOps, is responsible for each microservice, i.e., it "owns" the service. However, while systems relying on MSA have several architectural advantages especially for cloud applications, their realization is characterized by an increased accidental complexity due to redundant handcrafting of implementation, e.g., to make each service standalone runnable. A promising way to cope with such complexity is the usage of Model-driven Development (MDD) whereby models are used as first-class entities in the software development process. Although there are already first steps taken on how MDD could be applied by a single team to implement its microservices, the question of how MDD can be adapted to MSA's development distribution across multiple teams remains an issue. In this paper we envision the application of Collaborative Model-driven Software Engineering (CMDSE) to MDD of MSA by surveying relevant characteristics of CMDSE and identifying challenges for its application to MSA. The present paper takes a first step towards enabling holistic MDD of MSA across microservice teams.